A tale of two gay men

06Sep

Fascinating column by South Australian conservative and former John Howard speech writer Christopher Pearson in Saturday’s Australian. Full marks to him for frankness, but he encapsulates a syndrome I have seen in some others, including a noted Sydney literary academic and another very vocal supporter of the monarchy and the High Church.

At the time friends reminded me of how, in 1982, British author Malcolm Muggeridge had described his conversion as "a rat swimming towards a sinking ship", prompting a telegram from B.A. Santamaria: "Welcome aboard."…

Despite my apprehensions that Catholicism wasn’t going to be a bed of roses, it was clear to me that if I wanted to return to the practice of the faith, there was nowhere else to go. I could never have been happy as a gay Christian — with or without a rainbow sash — because it always seemed to me a contradiction in terms.

There was no getting around the fact the New Testament said we were all meant to be chaste or monogamously married and I had reluctantly concluded that St Paul was right about homosexual sex.

In any case, prudence in the plague years meant I gradually became all but sexually inactive from the mid-1980s and no longer saw much point in defining my identity primarily in terms of sexual preference…

Some of my friends said at the time that I must have crossed the Tiber for the sake of beautiful music and ceremony. But as Gerard Manley Hopkins told his family in reply to similar charges, if it had simply been a matter of aesthetic preferences, the Church of England would always have been far more congenial. Hopkins deplored the kitsch that mostly characterised Catholic devotional life in England then. Heaven only knows what he would have made of the banality of the present-day English liturgy.

What I most wanted was not beauty, crucial though it is, but certainty: immutable doctrine and valid sacraments. As an Anglican, the closest I had come to "the peace which passes all understanding" had been through the sacraments: in the confessional and at the altar rail. By my late 40s it felt like time to come back to them…

Ah, the chimera of certainty! So much has been and is being wrought in this world by that particular phantasm! Had Christopher been born in a Muslim country, heaven knows where that drive may have led him – different outcome, perhaps, but the drive to abnegation is identical.

Compare a young man of note.

That is in today’s Sun-Herald. Yes, it is diver Matthew Mitcham, Australia’s pride at the Beijing Olympics.

In the seats high above the Sydney Aquatic Centre dive pool, Matthew Mitcham is wearing a printed white T-shirt and blue jeans, his blond hair neatly cut, and is pondering life beyond elite sport, with the caveat his ambitions are subject to revision week by week.

“I’d like to discover new things, help to change the world,” he says.

Chlorine blankets the air and a coach’s booming voice echoes from the adjacent swimming lanes, the water jets gushing and splashing. Mitcham’s talking about a career in medicine, maybe, whenever he stops diving: “I think everyone deep down wants to do that; leave their mark.”

Ah, but a year ago at the glowing blue Water Cube at the Olympic Games in Beijing, Brisbane-born, Sydney-based Mitcham left an indelible mark. He achieved the highest diving score in Olympic history with his back two-and-a-half somersault with two-and-a-half twists in the pike position.

Then, in the spectator stands before the world’s media, he briefly kissed his Sydney-born partner, marketing strategist Lachlan Fletcher, and gave him his bouquet. No sweat.

“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” declared his diminutive, beaming mother, Vivienne, who was also by his side as her boy earned a perfect score of 10, “I don’t know who cried more, him or me.”

Six months later he danced on the lead float as chief of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade. At the time, the throng that turned out to line Oxford Street must have pondered that there were few secrets in the life of Matt Mitcham, now 21…

Does Mitcham, more than a year later, see his coming out as brave? “I don’t see sexuality as influencing my beliefs or opinions or perceptions of anybody. Whether they’re gay, straight, bi, trans, experimental, I don’t care. I see it as a very uninfluential factor.”…

4 responses to “A tale of two gay men”

“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” declared his diminutive, beaming mother, Vivienne, who was also by his side as her boy earned a perfect score of 10, “I don’t know who cried more, him or me.”

What the…? There’s no crying in diving!

Heh. I agree though. Let’s make sexual preference an uninfluential factor in everything. Let’s start by ending those perverse gay pride parades. If you agree to that, I promise to convince the rest of the world to stop having overtly sexual hetero pride parades. Fair enough?

Haha, indeed! Fat Tuesday (aka Mardi Gras) celebrations are notorious for their base displays of sexuality on both sides of the aisle. I’d say that it’s a LITTLE better than the gay parades simply because it celebrates all casual sex, and not a specific kind of casual sex. Plus, most of the world does not want to see a man’s butt cheeks as you see often in those gay parades. There’s somewhat less disdain for boobies.

Still, it seems like a weird thing to celebrate.

Mal

September 7, 2009 at 7:34 pm

What a sad and dull life Christopher Pearson must lead. He is almost enough to make one stop buying the Australian. I’m glad I missed that issue.

The Discovery of Global Warming -- hypertext history of how scientists came to (partly) understand what people are doing to cause climate change: from the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics.

Islamophobes please note

This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This material is distributed without profit.

The writings and opinions written on this weblog do not necessarily represent any organisation(s) the writer may be affiliated with.